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[Enclosure No 2 to Despatch No 1175]
[5257]

Paris

May 5th, 1920.

To His Excellency Woodrow WILSON
President of the United States,
White House, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Your Excellency:

The Albanian Delegation begs once more
the honour of addressing you. When their cause seemed hopeless
your intervention, (which we can only regard as Providential),
saved Albania from dismemberment. The proposal that Albania
be recognized as an Independent State by the League of Nations,
we naturally assume must be accredited to you. Likewise the
excellent restrictions placed upon Italy as Mandatory, embodied
in the Memorandum of December 9th we believe to be due to
you; and that the terms were not more liberal, even to the
granting of the boundaries of 1913 and the right of the
Albanian people to choose for themselves their friend and
guardian among the nations would have been fully recognized,
we are sure, had you been able to apply your principle of
"Self-Determination" to her case. No delegation can be more
deeply conscious of the difficulties under which you have
laboured in behalf of small nations and particularly their
own, than the Albanian Delegation. Whatever the outcome may
be, Your Excellency will always be deeply and gratefully es-
teemed by the Albanian representatives and their nation.

Since the Memorandum of December 9th has become the
basis of negotiations for the settlement of the Adriatic-Alba-
nian question, we beg again to call your attention to the
following considerations.

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